How about giving the players the option to engage their character/toons/whatchicallits in some long term quest or something while the players take a vacay, work on their mix tapes, need to lay low for a bit far from the searching eyes of the law, whathaveyou? The few long weekends or weeks that life absolutely demands our attention no matter that Uncle Gary hasn't seen you since middle school so don't make me go see him and the rest of your in-bred second cousins MOM! uhm, I mean when we will be away from the game a stretch it would be nice knowing that game-wise we aren't sitting completely idle. And no I will not trust Mel with my password while I am gone and come back to find out I started my own guild of Pixies Only called "The Love Nest!" I'm thinking something along the lines of Guard Duty (*snicker* doo-tee) where we can set a timer and earn a fraction of the Gold and/or XP. A limit of a week per 6months to prevent any weird abuse maybe. Time frames would be in 24hr increments. Yes! I packed my suit MOM! Anyhows, just another brilliant idea I am handing you free of any liability or hopes of monetary gain.

A 2nd bar underneath the "10 hour" one.
This one allows 1-10 days of guard duty (ha ha, that is funny Dorian, doo-tee)
A great help for us while on vacation, wedding - honeymoon, jail, moving houses, school studying, tough time at work, field exercises in the military, out of country, funeral-grieving, etc..

Can not be abused as it is 10 days x 10 hours of guard duty time (snicker).
Or 100 hours. Not 240 hours. Even if you collected during a gold weekend. You have not done anything else for 10 days. Gold weekend is 2 days out of 28. If it is calculated to be able to be abused, bring it down to 5 days maximum or some such.